sibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named
by the Diggers--those degraded savages who roast their dead
relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with
tar, and 'gaum' it thick all over their heads and foreheads
and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it
_mourning_. _These_ are the gentry that named the
Lake.

"People say that Tahoe means 'Silver Lake'--'Limpid
Water'--'Falling Leaf.' Bosh! It means grasshopper soup, the
favorite dish of the Digger tribe--and of the Pi-utes as well.
It isn't worth while, in these practical times, for people to
talk about Indian poetry--there never was any in them--except
in the Fenimore Cooper Indians. But _they_ are an extinct
tribe that never existed. I know the Noble Red Man. I have
camped with the Indians; I have been on the warpath with them,
taken part in the chase with them--for grasshoppers; helped
them steal cattle; I
have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast. I
would gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance.

"But I am growing unreliable."

With all due deference to the wisdom--as well as the humor--of Mark
Twain as applied to Lake Tahoe, I emphatically disagree with him as to
the Indians of the Tahoe region, and also as to the name of the Lake.
Tahoe is quite as good-sounding a name as Como, Lucerne, Katrine or
Lomond. A name, so long as it is euphonious, is pleasing or not, more
because of its associations than anything else. The genuine Indian,
as he was prior to the coming of the white man, was uncorrupted,
uncivilized, unvitiated, undemoralized, undiseased in body, mind and
soul, a nature-observer, nature-lover and nature-worshiper. He was
full of poetic conceptions and fired with a vivid imagination that
created stories to account for the existence of unusual, peculiar or
exceptional natural objects, that, in brilliancy of conception, daring
invention, striking ingenuity and vigor of detail _surpass_, or
at least equal, the best imaginative work of Kipling or _Mark Twain
himself_. It seems to me that his--the Indian's--name for this
Lake--Tahoe--is both euphonious and full of poetic and scientific
suggestion. It is poetic in that it expresses in a word the unequaled
height and purity of so large a body of water, and scientific in that
it is truthful and accurate.

But Fremont, the discoverer, evidently did not ask or seek to know its
Ind